The truth is, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, he allowed himself
to look upon all nations but his own as barbarians: not only Hibernia,
and Scotland, but Spain, Italy, and France, are attacked in the same
poem. If he was particularly prejudiced against the Scots, it was
because they were more in his way; because he thought their success in
England rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit; and
because he could not but seenin them that nationality which I believe
no liberal-minded Scotsman will deny. He was indeed, if I may be
allowed the phrase, at bottom much of a John Bull; much of a blunt
'true born Englishman'. There was a stratum of common clay under the
rock of marble. He was voraciously fond of good eating; and he had a
great deal of that quality called humour, which gives an oiliness and
a gloss to every other quality.

I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my
travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France,
I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love 'every kindred and
tongue and people and nation'. I subscribe to what my late truly
learned and philosophical friend Mr Crosbie said, that the English are
better animals than the Scots; they are nearer the sun; their blood is
richer, and more mellow: but when I humour any of them in an
outrageous contempt of Scotland, I fairly own I treat them as
children. And thus I have, at some moments, found myself obliged to
treat even Dr Johnson.

To Scotland however he ventured; and he returned from it in great
humour, with his prejudices much lessened, and with very grateful
feelings of the hospitality with which he was treated; as is evident
from that admirable work, his Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland, which, to my utter astonishment, has been misapprehended,
even to rancour, by many of my countrymen.

To have the company of Chambers and Scott, he delayed his journey so
long, that the court of session, which rises on the eleventh of
August, was broke up before he got to Edinburgh.

On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I
received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn, at the
head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me
cordially; and I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually
in Caledonia. Mr Scott's amiable manners, and attachment to our
Socrates, at once united me to him. He told me that, before I came in,
the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness.
He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made
sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted a lump
of sugar, and put it into it. The Doctor, in indignation, threw it out
of the window. Scott said, he was afraid he would have knocked the
waiter down. Mr Johnson told me, that such another trick was played
him at the house of a lady in Paris. He was to do me the honour to
lodge under my roof. I regretted sincerely that I had not also a room
for Mr Scott. Mr Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High Street,
to my house in James's court: it was a dusky night: I could not
prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. I
heard a late baronet, of some distinction in the political world in
the beginning of the present reign, observe, that 'walking the streets
of Edinburgh at night was pretty perilous, and a good deal
odoriferous'. The peril is much abated, by the care which the
magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against throwing foul
water from the windows; but, from the structure of the houses in the
old town, which consist of many stories, in each of which a different
family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour still
continues. A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be
without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched
slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, 'I smell you in the dark!' But he
acknowledged that the breadth of the street, and the loftiness of the
buildings on each side, made a noble appearance.

My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he delighted to
drink at all hours, particularly when sitting up late, and of which
his able defence against Mr Jonas Hanway should have obtained him a
magnificent reward from the East India Company. He shewed much
complacency upon finding that the mistress of the house was so
attentive to his singular habit; and as no man could be more polite
when he chose to be so, his address to her was most courteous and
engaging; and his conversation soon charmed her into a forgetfulness
of his external appearance.

I did not begin to keep a regular full journal till some days after we
had set out from Edinburgh; but I have luckily preserved a good many
fragments of his Memorabilia from his very first evening in Scotland.

We had, a little before this, had a trial for murder, in which the
judges had allowed the lapse of twenty years since its commission as a
plea in bar, in conformity with the doctrine of prescription in the
civil law, which Scotland and several other countries in Europe have
adopted.